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Sunday, 19 August 2012

MAC Heavenly Creature–Summer 2012

After the excitement of last week’s outdoor photoshoot (here) it’s back to the indoor photo studio this week – i.e. my living room! Today I thought I’d share some pics of and thoughts on the MAC Summer 2012 mineralize collection Heavenly Creature as I’ve had these products for a month now so I’ve had some time to play around with them.

MAC isn’t really my favourite make-up brand and I find it quite expensive but I was travelling through an airport last month and since I hadn’t really tried much of their mineralize make-up before I thought it was as good an opportunity as any to pick up some pieces from their latest collection. I’ve given the current prices from their website below which include VAT but I paid 20% less at the airport.

I bought a mineralize skin finish (MSF) in the shade Star Wonder (£21.50 for 7g) and a mineralize blush in the shade Solar Ray (£19 for 3.2g). Let’s look at some photos first before getting down to some number crunching…

Both products are very shimmery with Solar Ray being exceptionally glittery as well, which can hopefully be seen somewhat in the skin swatches. Both products are in fact pigmented enough to be worn as blushes but the price per gram of the blush is £5.94 while the skin finish comes in at £3.07 per gram, meaning that weight for weight it actually works out 48% cheaper than the blush. Therefore I’d say that if you’re looking for a product that you intend to use a lot your best bet is to go for one of the MSFs – there are four shades available in this collection ranging from light pink to dark plum. I’ve been using Star Wonder as my everyday blush since I got it (you can see it on my cheeks and more pics in this post) and I’m really pleased with both the pigmentation, application and longevity of the product so I would definitely consider buying more MSF in the future. I do quite like Solar Ray actually because it’s not apologetic – it’s a loud, glittery orange and proud of it! Unfortunately for me I was wearing this the day they decided to update our staff photos at work so I ended up with an orange face in mine, but I do think it’s good fun. It’s really expensive compared to the MSF though.

Next up let’s take a look at the two eyeshadows I bought – the medium brown shade Earthly and the light silvery blue shade Bright Moon.

These retail in the UK at £16.50 for 1.8g. The selling point of these has to be the beautiful swirling pattern of the shadow in the pan - there are three different three distinct veins of colour and shimmer clearly visible in each of these shadows. Unfortunately though that just doesn’t translate to any complexity in the shadow once it’s applied to the skin – in the swatches above these shadows are inescapably banal; a rather dull mid-tone brown and a very run of the mill light blue. The colours are nowhere near as interesting as either the blush or the MSF above in my opinion. They’re good as everyday colours, quick to fling on in a hurry for work as a wash across the eyelids, but not really what I was hoping for given the price point and the beautiful pans. I would have to love the colour a lot to buy another mineralize eyeshadow.

Finally I picked up one of the skincare products in the collection, a face scrub containing volcanic ash.

Now despite having studied chemistry at uni I don’t really remember much about it at all but I don’t see many minerals in that ingredients list unless you count volcanic ash and the iron oxides, which are present in the smallest amount of any of the ingredients given that they come last in the list! The first ingredient on the list is sucrose- yup, plain ol’ sugar. That’s what gives this product its grainy consistency and provides the physical “scrub” as you wash your face with it.

A little bit goes a long way which I was trying to illustrate above. I actually quite like the use of sucrose because, being water soluble, it dissolves the more you rub it in water, so while the scrub has a very gritty consistency when first applied it soon smoothes out. Oh and it also tastes sweet if you ever accidentally get any on your tongue! The back of the packaging recommends use once to three times a week. This retails at £21 for 100ml and I would expect this to last me up to six months of use as directed.